-As the U.S.

Department of Justice steps up prosecutions of alleged non-citizen voting ahead of the midterms, there's a new look at documented cases of election fraud in our region.

A report from the Lincy Institute and Brookings Mountain West at UNLV counts cases from 1998 through 2025.

It covers five Mountain West states--Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah--and relies on data from the conservative Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Map.

To learn more about the report's findings, we sat down with David Damore, Executive Director of the Lincy Institute and Brookings Mountain West.

David Damore, welcome back to Nevada Week.

-Thanks for having me.

-Let's start with the presence of non-citizen voting within this new report.

(David Damore) Very rare.

So you look at that, and the, the Heritage, where these data come from, they use a pretty broad definition of election fraud.

But in this category, what they call ineligible voters, those are deceased voters--we had one of those in Nevada--a felon voter and minor voters, and then non-resident voters and non-citizen voters.

So in the time period we look at in the, across the Mountain West, you have two cases of that, one in Nevada in 2014 in Washoe County and then a case in Colorado in 2005.

-Two cases in 30 years in the five mountain west states?

-Yeah.

And if you look at all those, it's about 55 million votes were cast during all the elections in the time period we look at.

-As you brought to my attention ahead of this interview, the U.S.

District Attorney is saying that there are two Nevadans who are lawful residents but have illegally voted in the 2024 election.

-And that just came in today, yes.

Yeah.

-How do you stack that number up compared to-- -And we don't know.

Those are just indictments.

We don't know if they're going to be found guilty, right?

And it's unclear also if you think about the back and forth with the Trump administration and the Secretary of State's office where they had started with something like 16,000 non-citizen residents on the rolls.

Then it was reduced to 185.

It's unclear if these were cases that came from that, that 185.

We don't know.

This is just sort of breaking news on that.

But, obviously, very vigilant.

I think there was 20 cases in California that came out of this as well.

-Okay.

And this is the Department of Justice asking states for voter roll information and claiming that they have non-citizen voters on their rolls.

Why did you use data from the Heritage Foundation?

-For a couple of reasons.

First, you know, most everybody knows this doesn't happen very often, so there isn't a lot of data collected on this.

You see sort of like the Brennan Center does a little bit of work on this, but the sort of schadenfreude for the liberals is here you have one of the most conservative think tanks that sort of created the Project 2025 of the Trump administration.

If you go back to the first Trump administration, it was these data that provided the basis of the fraud commission that then, that President Trump put together.

And that, of course, disbanded without any making any recommendations or any findings because the data just don't support this sort of widespread notion on that.

So that was the the reason why for using the Heritage.

-Right.

But I would argue with you, there is contingent out there who does not believe that election fraud is rare.

-There are.

You're absolutely right.

And it's really hard to reach those people.

-Even with this kind of data?

-With this kind of work, exactly.

You know, we just know, particularly in the era of fragmented media, right, people are getting-- they're in their echo chambers.

They're getting this information coming over and over again.

And particularly when it comes from the President if you're a Republican, that's a pretty strong cue for you as well there.

There's also been some interesting work here on looking at sort of how people, in the face of this sort of when evidence doesn't support your beliefs, they tend to sort of use rationalizations.

They tend to sort of rethink this, how this went.

"Well, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

That's all that they're reporting" kind of stuff there.

There's also, if you go back to 2020, the Presidential election there, there was a sort of that red mirage, right?

Everybody knew who followed the election that on election night Trump was going to be ahead just because of the partisan differences in how votes are cast, right?

So in-person votes get cast first and then mail votes take a while.

Obviously, states have gotten better at processing mail, Nevada, in particular, for doing that.

So you saw this early evidence of Trump's up.

Go to bed that night, and then you wake up next morning, he's behind.

That fuels that suspicion, and that's just this sort of artifact of how the votes get counted here.

But if you're already in that mindset and not thinking about that, that's going to foster that.

I think when you watch some of the reporting on TV when they're sort of trying to be up to date, I think they do a pretty good job of saying, Okay, we're going to get a big dump from a Democratic voting candidate --excuse me, county-- to sort of prime people a little bit on this that these are coming from different spaces and these different spaces have different patterns of voting.

But, you know, if you want to buy into it, you're going to buy into it.

-What do you make of early voting numbers so far in Nevada?

-About what you'd expect.

Democrats have a lot of enthusiasm.

Obviously, I think the morning report today, they're up about six points.

You also see what we've seen last couple of midterms, and that is the nonpartisans are making up a smaller share relative to registration, so the electorate is going to be more partisan as opposed to during the Presidential election where you saw really high nonpartisan voting, essentially almost at the same rate as the Democrats in that race there.

So you're going to end up with a more partisan electorate.

What surprised me is after 2024, where the Republicans had really sort of pushed early voting, mail voting, get your voting in early.

And they did a really good job.

I mean, that was the first election in my memory when they were ahead coming out of the early vote.

This time, it doesn't seem that they're going to sort of be putting it on maybe this weekend or Election Day vote.

And that's, you know, a risky one here.

But, obviously, there's a, there's a lot of, I think, Republicans who are still kind of mulling their choices, "Do I want to vote?"

But the Democrats, they're, they very much want to, want to be-- have their vote cast, get it out of the way.

-And what's unique about Nevada and I think some of the rural counties is that they rely on the mail-in ballots, and that tended to be more Conservative areas, right?

-Mm-hmm.

-Are you taking anything from that number of how many mail-in ballots have come in?

-They're, you know, they're going to be about 2 to 1 out there.

So, you know, that's where the Republicans need a big turnout there.

But the problem is, is there's just not enough voters, right?

If Clark continues to vote at its pace, right--and it's a Democratic-leaning county, more than--and Democrats have done a nice job in the months leading up to it to bolstering their registration number, something they hadn't done the prior two cycles there.

So there's a bigger pot of Democratic voters than there was maybe a few years ago to do that, so I think that that's the challenge for the Republicans, they can sort of run up the score in the rurals.

The other problem for the Republicans is Washoe County keeps trending more Democratic for them.

Where that used to be a Republican-leaner, then it was kind of 50-50, and then now you see it.

Even though the Democrats don't have strong registration numbers, they're winning that county.

-What do you think of Republican Governor Joe Lombardo's chances of keeping his seat now versus a month ago?

-If you'd asked me this five, six weeks ago, I would have said, you know, it's going to tighten there.

And now, I think you look at these early voting numbers; he's got to be quite concerned on this.

And I think as Lombardo goes, so goes the Republican ticket, right?

If he loses, I think the Democrats are going to sweep the constitutional offices.

I think they end up with potentially super majorities on that.

Now, if he wins, holds on and narrow win, what does that mean for those sort of, for the Secretary of State race?

That's probably going to be Democratic, but the Attorney General's race, Lieutenant Governor's race, right?

So that I think is the key there.

I don't think-- I think the Republicans are going to struggle in the, the three Democratic House seats.

You think about two years ago, five-point swing towards the Republicans.

That gerrymander held up, and now you have the win in the back for the Democrats.

Even though the Republicans are putting a lot of money in those races, I don't think they're going to come in for them.

-What else stands out to you about this election fraud in the Mountain West report?

-The big question is just how rare it is, right, is that, you know, all the rhetoric around it.

And you have a concerted effort for the last 10 years to really focus on this issue, and they just don't support it.

It just doesn't support it.

And so this gives, you know, we're obviously going to have-- I think voter ID will pass again.

I don't think that that's, really there isn't much of a counter campaign to that at all.

You've seen that across the country.

So that's the sort of response to that, and we're going to have that implemented for the next election in Nevada unless something dramatically is relative to the vote two years ago.

-Right, okay.

So from the report from 1998 to 2025, the Heritage Foundation reported 85 cases of election fraud across those five-- -And, again, that's a broad definition because you're looking at voter intimidation in there.

You're looking at falsifying signatures on ballot petitions and not just ineligible people voting.

So that was all of those put together, and so that's about, again, about 55 million votes cast in those elections in those states.

-And the majority of the cases were duplicate voting, which means what?

-Yeah.

It means people voted multiple times.

The other thing-- -Purposely?

-They forgot they did, or they didn't want to double check, right?

"Oh, I wasn't sure about the mail, so I voted this way."

The other one that's common, less so in Nevada but you see it quite often in the database, is felons voting.

So that's a fairly common ineligible voter voting because the states vary quite a bit on ex-felons' eligibility on that.

So the point is that it's rare.

The people who do it, they get caught on this.

But this has just been a sort of persistent part of the election narrative, really even before Trump.

But he's really sort of amplifying it through his megaphone.

-All right.

David Damore, thank you for returning to Nevada Week.

-Sure.

Thank you.